This post has in a sense been handed to me by two or three responses to my post On not getting it. In the course of discussing how a reade...

Wednesday, 31 July 2013

Two Poems

Where To?

With our new technologies,
awareness of the pitfalls
of attempts to re-tune nature,
new understandings
of the ways that nature works,
we should be heading for
a new age of enlightenment.

I do not think we are.

I think we're heading for a new dark age
and taking all our gadgets with us --
which will make the new dark age
much darker the old.

Special Delivery

Delivered just this morning
by courier
(Stork Logistics Inc)
a wooden crate
stuffed with straw:
the very latest
new idea.
Not in solid form,
no clever
shiny
artefact
but
the newest of ideas
still at its inception,
lost among the straw.

This is a nice pairing. I like the second the best but the first resonated the most. There’s a film I watched a while back called Idiocracy. It’s not the greatest of films but the idea is: a future where, because of technology, everyone’s forgotten everything. They don’t have to think for themselves anymore and so they don’t. I feel it even now. I blame my inability to remember stuff on the sheer amount of stuff I try to absorb daily. Absorption takes time and when you’re already full—albeit full of froth—all the new stuff can do is spill over and all you get to do is glimpse it sliding down the side of the glass. I remember a scripture that talked about reading the scriptures “in an undertone” day and night. That expression often gets translated as “meditate”. When was the last time you meditated on anything, meditated as in deep thinking? I can still remember stuff I learned by rote at school but not what I read last week.

Poems that are great warnings and meditations.The second one has got a "Biennale spirit", I am referring to works of art, some I often very much appreciate, at the various Biennale pavilions here in Venice.

Cait What a lovely idea: a little bit of technology that would lead us to enlightenment, not away from it! I'd like a bit of that!

Brian That's always been my prob. - not knowing what a good idea looks like!

Mary Good point made there: that rebirth is always just around the corner.

Tabor Alas, yes, I fear...

Jim You remind me of Plato'd dictum:

“If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.”

Yes, all these lovely gadgets may indeed be our downfall.Takes much time & patience to wade through all that packing straw, and then (if you're me, that is) you wind up missing the idea or worse, throwing it out...